Nujira claims to dominate envelope tracking

LONDON – Nujira Ltd., a ten year old pioneer of envelope-tracking (ET) for use in energy efficient power amplifiers in mobile communications, reckons it owns nearly one fifth of relevant patents and nearly twice as many as the next-most active company, Quantance Inc.

Envelope tracking is a technique that saves power compared with conventional constant-supply voltage PAs by dynamically adjusting the supply voltage to the PA to maximize the energy efficiency over the whole modulation cycle. With over 200 patents granted and pending, Nujira claims it is in good shape to start benefitting from design wins in mobile phones in 2014.

In a briefing on the introduction of a 16-band RF front-end reference design for global LTE handsets called Woodstock, Nujira said that 12 chipset vendors had taped out ET-capable 4G modems in 2012 with another six planning to do so over the next three to six months.

Nujira, which was founded in 2002, has 68 employees and has raised $72 million of equity funding to date. The company was also instrumental in the formation of the OpenET Alliance and in the adoption of a system approach to ET within the MIPI Alliance.

The company added that while two companies: Qualcomm Inc. and Fujitsu Semiconductor Ltd. have announced ET capability at least 17 other companies are working on ET-ready mobile platforms.